The challenge of building trust:Is technology there to save the media?

What if the business of the news media is not based on the monetization of big volumes of internet traffic but on the capacity of building trust, influencing society and endorsing world views? This is Alberto Barreiro’s view, Chief Experience Officer for the Spanish PRISA media group.

What are the technological innovations that need to come from this? Might blockchain technology offer solutions? Blockchains are a transparent and decentralised way of recording lists of transactions. They may help shift some control over daily interactions with technology away from central elites, redistributing it among users, as we read in a report of the European Parliamentary Research Service. However working with blockchains remains technologically very complex. Therefore the Dutch startup Publicism is developing a dashboard that makes it easier to use. They explicitly work at it with the intention of keeping a free press, empowering the individual journalist to distribute his work in an independent fashion without interferences of e.g. a centralised management system. The ‘GAFAM’ * are also working on this, adding another interesting perspective. The race for more ease-of-use and security for the users has only just begun. Some speak of a third wave of digital innovation coming upon us. Another challenge for media companies in gaining (back) trust is to develop further an effective social media strategy able to link with different groups of people of different age and to burst the filter bubbles dividing contemporary societies. A lot of work is still to be done to improve and clarify the complex relationship between publishers and platforms.

All this will come up during successive presentations. Intro message by way of Skype : Albert Barreiro, Prisa Media Group ; Life presentations by Ehsan Fadakar head of Social Strategy at Schibsted Media Group Sweden, Dieter Boen, Manager Innovation VRT & Tim Verheyden, VRT, Journalist, Eén (Pano) , Guillaume Klossa Director Public Affairs EBU, Dragan Sekulovski (director of ZNM, Macedonian Association of Journalists) and by Skype Pieter Haasnoot from Publicism.